When Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. won the presidency in 2022, Filipino journalists were left asking a simple question: would he deal with the media any differently from Rodrigo Duterte? (ANU Philippines Institute) Four years later, the answer from press freedom monitors is mixed. Some things have genuinely changed. The tools that matter most to journalists’ day-to-day safety have largely not. The headline numbers show ambiguity. In the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, the Philippines rose from 116th to 114th place among 180 countries. Yet its score of 46.97 out of 100 still places it in RSF’s “difficult” category, and the improvement came as global press freedom fell to its lowest level since 2001. A small climb in rank, in other words, is not the same as more freedom. What has genuinely changed The most visible difference is language. Duterte was openly hostile to reporters; the International Press Institute recalled that

Nicaragua now has, for practical purposes, no independent press operating on its own soil. Nearly two decades into Daniel Ortega’s presidency, and eight years after the anti-government protests of April 2018, the country’s media landscape has been reduced to state and family-controlled outlets, a scattered diaspora of exiled newsrooms, and legal architecture built to keep both from ever converging again. A Strategy Refined Over Two Decades A report from the exiled journalist network Las Exiliadas Nicas, produced with support from Reporters Without Borders Spain and presented in Madrid in April 2026, describes the campaign in stark terms: sixty-one media outlets shut down, journalists imprisoned, more than 300 forced into exile, and roughly two-thirds of Nicaraguan territory left without any local news coverage at all, what press-freedom monitors now call a “news desert.” The pattern is not new, but it has accelerated. According to Freedom House’s 2026 country report, the independent

On paper, Sweden looks like one of the safest countries in the world to be a journalist. In Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index, the country ranks 5th out of 180 nations, a mark most governments would envy. But a new report released by RSF just days before Sweden’s 13 September general election tells a more complicated story: one of quiet erosion, growing hostility toward reporters, and a public-access tradition under strain. The report, titled “Closed Doors: Local Journalists on Press Freedom Challenges in the 2026 Election Year,” surveyed 25 permanently employed journalists working in local and regional Swedish newsrooms between March and May 2026. It does not claim to be statistically representative of the profession as a whole. But the pattern it documents is consistent enough to be alarming: transparency is shrinking, harassment is common, and many journalists expect things to get worse, not better. A Ranking